February 24, 2012

The clear implication, at the end of the bizarre arc from October 23rd to the 28th, 1989, is that the entirety of the Garfield comic strip is, in some way, an elaborate hallucination, a paranoid delusion, or an extended meditation on a stage of grief.

It's a weird storyline, like a cross between old EC comics and It's a Wonderful Life. But the conclusion is ectoplasmic:

Garfield is a ghost. And a real ghost, not some bullshit about a lingering soul trying to finish up his business. Ghosts are space. They are, particularly, a becoming-consciousness of space. Ghosts are not embodied, or if they are, it is a function of narrative and not ghost-ness; ghosts are absences of space, absences within space, that structure the space. And so, apparently, is Garfield.

February 06, 2012

A dark current of productive influence ran from American radio to horror comics. Classic audio theater from the 30s and 40s fed the rising comic industry.

Examples:

Lights Out, May 18, 1943, "The Spider": Two men discover and try to capture a giant spider the size of a dog, with grim results. The same plot occurs in "Sucker for a Spider", EC's Tales from the Crypt 29, 1952.

Lights Out, December 1, 1942, "The Story of Mr. Maggs": A haunted chest murders the occupants of a house one at a time. Also "The Visiting Corpse" (from Mysterious Traveler, August 10, 1948): A man kills his wife and hides her dismembered corpse in a trunk before being forced to hid the trunk and getting crushed to death by it when he falls down a flight of stairs dragging it down to the basement. Those two stories are echoed in "Tight Grip", EC's Tales from the Crypt 38, 1953.

The Strange Dr. Weird, December 19, 1944, "White Pearls of Terror": A ruthless criminal takes refuge on a remote island only to realize too late that he has disembarked on a leper colony. The same plot is recycled in "A Rottin' Trick" EC's Tales from the Crypt 29, April 1952.

October 23, 2011

The American Centers for Disease Control (CDC) published a zombie story this month. The aim is pedagogical: to teach us how to prepare for emergencies.

It's a graphic novella in format, a single pdf. There's an accessible text version, too.

The plot concerns a zombie plague and two teenagers' survival strategies, along with a sketch of governmental responses. The point is to teach readers how to assemble an emergency survival kit, as is made clear by the concluding thunderstorm.

Interesting how they rely on the internet for information, but have no connection with other people through cell phones:

There's an unfortunate it-was-all-a-dream ploy, but I'll charitably assume that was to avoid scaring some kids.